Georgetown's Reparations Are Not Enough

College is as much an idea as a location. Shaded quads and imposing libraries, fraternity parties and football games, impassioned peers and engaged professors represent both the individual aspirations of families and the social goals of a nation. College is the ultimate consumer item of American meritocracy. Even as a debate about reforming college and its cost rages, the notion remains that college is something more than a training ground. It is special.

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This idealism made it more jarring to be reminded last week that Georgetown University was an active participant in American slavery. On Thursday afternoon, Georgetown president John DeGioia announced that the university would offer a formal apology for the sale of 272 people in 1838 and that it would offer preferential admission to the descendants of these people, create an institute for the study of slavery, and change the name of several campus buildings to honor enslaved persons. "The most appropriate ways for us to redress the participation of our predecessors in the institution of slavery," DeGioia said, "is to address the manifestations of the legacy of slavery in our time."

Slave descendants at Georgetown's announcement that the university would be taking a number of actions to atone for the sale of slaves.

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What does this mean in practice? As an institution, Georgetown seeks a discernible, traceable, and quantifiable responsibility to particular persons. In 1838, the Jesuit brothers in Maryland sold 272 people. There are records of sale. Names. Traceable descendants. Some form of delayed justice seems possible. Georgetown has a unique moral imperative because it is still connected to the Jesuit order. Georgetown still believes in sin and redemption. It has evidence of its sin, and therefore must act.

Still, this arithmetic of reparation makes me nauseous. The transatlantic slave trade was such breathtaking evil that it defies simple calculation. What is the appropriate computational model for human suffering wrought by a system that extended across nearly four centuries and three continents? What is the labor value of 25 million men, women, and children?

"Administrations have simply presented this information in reports. They have behaved like this knowledge does not carry an imperative for action."​

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And Georgetown University is not unique for its predication in American slavery. In 2003, Ruth Simmons, then president of Brown University, and the first African American woman to serve as president of an Ivy League university, called for a reckoning. She charged her own university with investigating its linkage to the transatlantic slave trade. The report it produced in 2006 was groundbreaking. Since the Brown report, many universities have uncovered their particular histories of injustice: William and Mary, the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, Amherst, and Harvard are among the most extensive.

In the 2013 book Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities, MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder details the foundational role that slavery and slave labor had in building America's colleges and universities. "It has been a decade [since the Brown report], and most colleges have simply ignored their responsibly to act on the knowledge that their institutions profited from slavery," Wilder said to me last week. "Students, faculty, archivists were moved to action. These are the people who began a movement in the past decade to uncover these lost histories. But the administrations have simply presented this information in reports. They have behaved like this knowledge does not carry an imperative for action."

Where is the rest of the American academy? Where are the other colleges and universities? American colleges have largely compartmentalized the knowledge that higher education is inextricably linked with slavery, making it little more than campus trivia that they used human beings for debt payments. Georgetown's actions deserve praise. By taking even delayed, halting steps toward reparative justice, the university is showing admirable institutional responsibility. But the minuscule acknowledgment these actions represent in comparison to the enormity of the American academy's profit from centuries of slavery is breathtaking. This is not a moment for standing ovation, or even applause, because we have barely begun to set right the wrongs committed by our institutions of learning.

A report or public recognition is important acknowledgement that bad ideas have been exchanged for better ones. Words do matter. But colleges and universities also own property, buildings, and patents. We invest and earn profits. We compensate workers on our campuses for their labor based on our beliefs about the value they bring to our organizations. Colleges and universities cannot pretend slavery existed only as an idea, while ignoring the economic benefit it wrought, the buildings it raised, the grounds it leveled, the legacies it ensured. Universities ultimately have to grapple with slavery beyond the syllabus. To pursue justice, the institutions will have to argue about what constitutes a fairer distribution of assets earned in part through enslaved labor.

We have barely begun to set right the wrongs committed by our institutions of learning.

I asked Professor Wilder what might create an imperative for action for college and universities not bound to the particular definition of sin and redemption that ostensibly governs Georgetown. Activists "are looking to the history of their universities and demanding justice and accountability," he told me. "This may provide a model. It is possible if we understand this moment as an opening act. Anyone who reads this [Georgetown] report and thinks it as an act of closure is entirely premature."

Every fall I am reminded that college is as much an idea as a location. This academic year begins with serious moral questions: Who are we and what is our history? What do we owe one another? How do we use our institutions to produce fairness rather than injustice? I wonder how we will respond in the year ahead.